27

BEFORE I COULD HAVE ANOTHER CONVERSATION WITH CHEVI, HOWARD Hunt flew back abruptly to Washington, and obtained permission from Quarters Eye to return the Frente to Miami. Since it was Cal who authorized the move, I assumed my letter had contributed to the decision, although as I later learned, one of the safe houses in Mexico had been discovered by the Mexican police, and given the general situation our other safe house would probably prove useless.

So, Howard brought the gang back to Miami. He was gloomy. He could receive no kudos on his record, and Dorothy was hardly pleased at the disruption this had caused in the lives of their children. Schools would have to be changed once more. Besides, Howard would have to use his living quarters in Miami for working situations. To protect Don Eduardo’s cover, was he to ask his daughters to take on other last names as well? It was hopeless. The Hunts had to suffer a temporary separation. Dorothy rented a house in the environs of Washington and Howard kept his apartment in Miami. Of course, they now needed new fictions to explain to relatives in America why they were living apart.

His woes did not sweeten his temperament. If I had been under any impression that I was covering his absence with efficiency, he soon set that vanity packing: My record-keeping was exposed for what it was, passable, and when it came to the laundering of exile funds, Howard was not pleased with the number of transactions I had assigned to couriers (in the hope, as I tried to explain, that payment by hand rather than by check would cut the trail). The problem, of course, was that there were few available couriers we could trust with large sums. It usually came down to me, and I had enjoyed wearing money belts with sums as large as a hundred thousand dollars in them. Indeed, part of the pleasure revealed itself one night when I managed to have the money belt on, even as I was undressing for Modene. The knowledge that her slightly mysterious lover was carrying wads of cash managed to ignite new afterburners in Modene and in me—yes, I liked being a courier.

Hunt would have none of that. It was irresponsibly dangerous. Let word get out, and one could get robbed or killed. There were ways to transfer funds by written order that could still confuse the record. For that, he had a more experienced intermediary, a fellow named Bernard Barker. He would introduce me to him.

I had made other mistakes as well. The lesser members of the Frente with whom I had been dealing in Howard’s absence had begun to work out some military plans. They went into considerable development of detail and in the course of that, I had looked at many a map of Cuba, all eight hundred miles of the island, and began to enjoy various problems in logistics and strategy. Hunt, however, explained to me that military discussions with the Frente had to be seen as a harmless exercise, entertaining to one’s sense of irony. “I recognize,” said Hunt, “that it is tragic for some of these Cubans to remain innocent of their tactical impotence, and I am going to have no pleasure in explaining this condition to them when the time comes, but, Harry, face up—the key factor we confront is the DGI agents sent in by Castro. They are bound to pick up Frente plans and pass them back to Havana. So keep tipping your input toward disinformation. This operation is too important to leave it to Cuban generals.”

“I know you’re right,” I said, “but it does get to me.”

“Ethics, Harry, has to be subservient to the mosaic.”

I was thinking of the boatmen. A portion of my labor had gone into calling various boatyards from Maryland down to Key West and across the Gulf from Galveston to Tampa; we were in the business of buying used powercraft. Each night, boats were going out with Cuban exiles, some to plant explosives, others to infiltrate a few people back into Cuba where they could link up with underground organizations. A boatman might be getting killed right now as we spoke. I sighed. It was hard to know whether history was a chart you could study, or a tide.

One morning not long after Hunt’s return, I received a call from Dix Butler. He was coming to Miami for a short visit. Could we have dinner?

My first thought on hearing his voice was that Modene must not meet Dix. Love, I decided, was all too determined to explore one’s courage or the lack of it. I actually moved a supper date with Modene over to a later date in order to keep her away from Dix.

Butler, however, came off the airplane in a flat mood, and did not get around in any hurry to explaining his mission in Miami. In fact, we did not leave the airport. We drank in the nearest lounge.

“How long here?” I asked.

“Two days. I’m looking a couple of people over.”

“Can I ask who you are working for?”

“Negative.”

We drank for a while. We barely talked. Neither of us brought up Berlin. We were acting like men between whom nothing much had ever taken place. All the same, his flat mood menaced the air.

Out of a silence, I asked, “Are you still with Bill Harvey?”

“I might be.” He took a full pause. “I might not.”

“What is Bill up to?”

“Count on it,” he said. “Whatever it is, it is crazy enough for King William.”

We laughed—somewhat experimentally.

“I assume,” I said, “that he’s now in Washington.”

“Decent assumption.”

“Are you working for him?”

“Is your name Arnie Rosen?”

I had forgotten how powerful was Butler’s jab.

“In fact,” said Dix, “that’s how I found you. Through Arnie Rosen. Ask him what I’m doing. He probably knows.”

“I assume you are working for Bill Harvey.”

“I might say no. My work is peripatetic.”

He was wearing an expensive gold watch and a tropical silk suit that must have cost five hundred dollars.

“Can you tell me where you’ve been the last three years?”

“Laos.”

“The Golden Triangle?”

“It’s the mark of an asshole to keep asking questions,” said Dix.

“If,” I said, “you told me what you are here for, I might be able to help you.”

“You can’t,” he said. “I’m looking for a couple of Cubans who can handle weapons, steer a boat, live off the jungle, fear nothing, manage their rum, and thrive in filth. Got any recruits?”

“You’ll find them.”

“Let’s wipe this conversation.” He literally passed his hand over his face before he said more equably, “I have a couple of appointments to get to.”

“Good,” I said.

He stuck out his hand. I shook it. He did not try to destroy my metacarpals. He contented himself with staring into my eyes. I suspected he had been drinking since morning. “We’re all in it together, right?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Do you respect Castro?” he asked.

“I think I do.”

“I hate the son of a bitch,” he said.

“Why?”

“He is a year younger than me, and he has done more than I have done so far.”

I thought of making a joke, but he was too serious. “Look,” he said, “at any given moment, there are something like twenty superior people on earth. Castro is one of them. I am another. God, or whoever it is—it could be a fucking committee for all I care—has put us twenty down here on earth.”

“Why?” I asked. “To torture you?”

He laughed at that. He was merry for a moment the way a lion would be merry if the wind blew in one good unexpected whiff of carrion. “You,” he said, “are making decent efforts not to be stupid.”

Well, indeed, I was glad I had not brought Modene.

“Still,” he said, “you have it backwards. We are put on this earth to entertain the gods. By our contests. I respect Fidel Castro, but I am not overawed by him. I have a prayer: Put Fidel and me in the jungle together, and I am the one who will come out alive.”

After that, he was silent. Then, he was morose. When I finished my drink, he barely nodded as I left the table.

I called Rosen from the nearest pay phone, and woke him up. It was his night to catch an early sleep, but he did not grumble; in fact, he was quick to ask, “Did the big fellow look you up?”

“Certainly did. And certainly has a number of things he doesn’t care to talk about.”

“Yes,” said Rosen.

When he said no more, I waited before I asked: “Could you fill me in?”

“I could,” said Rosen, “but why should I? Our relations, Harry, are becoming a one-way street.”

I was more drunk than I realized. I almost made a long speech to Rosen. It would have said that in our work, the little piece one held of the whole was such an intense and crystalline piece of information that it created a tension, even a thirst in oneself to be filled in on, yes, the collateral data, so, of course, we all gossiped and wanted to know more. If we laughed at Arnie, it was envy, yes, Rosen, I said in my mind, it’s a form of respect, when all is said, that we call you to find out, but all I managed to mutter after what must have been a not wholly ineffective silence was, “I suppose, Arnie, if you don’t tell me, I won’t sleep as well.”

“So instead you woke me up.” This made him laugh, even gave him a good one, as if it suited his notion, after all, of our relations, and he said, “The big guy had to leave Berlin under a cloud.”

“Because of Iron-Ass Bill?”

“No. Because of an Inspector General. Iron-Ass actually saved him. Got him transferred to Laos.”

“And that’s all.”

“That’s all I know.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“How can you presume to make that remark?”

“Because I know as much as you. I know he was in Laos.”

Rosen found this funny as well. “God, are you drunk,” he said.

“Yes, I had bourbon for bourbon with the butler.”

“Oh, you don’t want to do that. Butlers are notoriously ramrod, if you know what I mean.”

“What I mean is, what is the big guy doing now?”

“I won’t tell you. Not under these auspices. I will only say—so that you don’t feel obliged to suck your thumb through the night—that he is associated once more with William the King, and it’s so hush-hush that it’s vanguard, supersecret, a fence, let us say, around the fence. Please do not ask me any more.”

“I won’t, because you don’t have that much to offer.”

“You are absolutely right.”

“Tell me then about the Inspector General who came to Berlin.”

I could feel his relief. This news was, after all, less sensitive. “Well the big guy had an ex-Nazi agent whom he no longer trusted, so he strung the fellow up and put turpentine on his genitals. Said it was to get a little closer to the truth.” Rosen began to laugh. “I know, it’s painful, but I have to laugh because the big guy said, ‘I made the Kraut hop. Think of all the Juden, Rosen, that this Nazi once kept hopping.’ And it was true, according to Dix—oh, hell, I’ll use his name. My phone is safe. I make certain it is. And you’re at a good pay phone, right? Dix says he, personally, always kept a double standard. That meant less mercy to ex-Nazi agents who had gotten naughty than run-of-the-mill agents who had gone bad. Only, Dix made one mistake. These ex-Nazis have a network. The turpentine victim complained to an influential friend in the BND. Bad luck for Dix. We had an Inspector General in Berlin that week who has a permanent burn on one side of his face. Naturally, the IG had sympathy for another burn victim. Dix was in the worst trouble of his life until Bill Harvey used his weight to get our big guy transferred to Laos.” Rosen sneezed. “You’ve done it again. I’ve told you all.”

“My blessings,” I said.

Later that night when I filled Modene in on a few modest things about Dix, and confessed that I had not wanted her to meet him, she was pleased. “You have nothing to fear from a man like that,” she said. “I could never be attracted to him.”

“Care to tell me why?”

“If he is the way you say he is, he is fixed in his mold of life, and I could not change him. I can’t be too attracted to a man I cannot change.”

I was about to say, “Can you change Jack Kennedy or Sam Giancana?” but I held back. Instead, I said, “Do you believe that you can alter me?”

“Oh,” she said, “it’s just difficult enough to be interesting.”